Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

TRAC’s BI team needed to generate a BI dashboard to track supply, demand, location, and usage patterns of their entire fleet of intermodal chassis across the nation. Before modernizing their big data platform, all data management and analysis were being done on a 20+ years tabular legacy system that forced them to perform a “data bashing” process where two or more reports would be generated. Then, data needed to be consolidated in order to produce an answer to their business questions. This process was long and costly, and the data was often outdated by the time results were delivered. 

The Solution

In an effort to become a data-driven company, TRAC Intermodal was able to complete a total transformation of their data platform within only two years, moving from outdated data management systems and paper reports to a fully managed data lake environment. 

After attempting a traditional data warehouse several years ago, TRAC Intermodal decided a data lake would be a better fit for the company, and possibly the first step to creating a successful data warehouse. The company chose Hortonworks, and has implemented it in the Microsoft Azure cloud, where the company has about 2 TB of data. Using AtScale, more traditional users can leverage their current tools to access data in the data lake. TRAC chose Hadoop as its foundation because it plans to instantiate its structured and unstructured data into a data lake.

The results

In the past, business users would pull reports with 150 columns and thousands and thousands of rows. Then they’d need to filter the information to find the insights they needed. 

Thanks to their modern Big Data architecture, TRAC Intermodal now has a single source for analytics and reporting, which utilizes predictive analytics and machine learning for fraud detection. TRAC was able to reduce the analytics report creation process and accelerate existing analytics report rendering significantly. TRAC also enabled a self-service environment, which brings the business user to the data. Users are not restricted from doing analysis on subsets of data due to limitations of a legacy system. With their new architecture in place, TRAC can consume new types and amounts of data that transform the way they do business in the supply-chain world.

Metrics

Today, TRAC Intermodal’s Hortonworks footprint is comprised of 2 clusters, 6 nodes in development, and 12 nodes in production -- totaling 2TB of data, and TRAC forecasts that this metric will double in the near future. TRAC was able to reduce the analytics report creation process from 30 days to 2 days and accelerate existing analytics report rendering from 90 minutes to less than 20+ seconds. 

The Technology

Hortonworks
AtScale

Disruptive Factor

In the past, reports would take 4 hours to run and staff used unsanctioned workarounds to get the data they needed. Now, the data lake provides a certified and sanctioned place for business users to get the data they need. Though the new system saves business users a lot of time, TRAC’s data team has faced challenges in the culture change. The team needed to get business users on board with the capabilities of these big data technologies and platforms. To help people feel comfortable with the new system, the team targeted very specific use cases by assessing business users’ needs. Then the team created streams of real-time data with dashboards, which enabled business users to get insights immediately, instead of waiting for hours or even days. Nine months later, the system has gained more widespread user acceptance. Now, the data team is launching other parts of its project, including the implementation of a new ERP system: Oracle eBusiness Suite. They also plan to load the company's historical data into the data lake and apply machine learning to that data. TRAC has disrupted the status quo -- challenging the notion that data has to be brought to the user and that users need to learn how to use new BI technologies in order to ingest data from different sources. Instead, they have been able to leverage their staff’s BI skills, eliminate manual intermediary work, and elevate their business through utilizing the latest data technology platform.

Shining Moment

TRAC Intermodal won Hortonworks’ Data Heroes Award. An article about TRAC Intermodal’s Big Data journey was published in InformationWeek.